Promote your school with the perfect school website!
If you are a school looking to impress parents, teachers and students with your online presence, we’ve put together some top tips to achieve a sophisticated and engaging school website.
So let’s look at what makes a pupil/parent friendly school website.
Improve your School Website with Clear Navigation
In the on-line world there is nothing worse than landing on a school website that is hard to navigate.
Use clear page titles to ensure that students and parents know exactly where they are, and where they want to be.
When planning your school website design and sitemap, make sure that it’s straightforward and concise.
Breadcrumbs will let students and parents travel back and forth easily through the sub navigation. This ensures a better all-round user experience.
Engaging and Informative Content
While good design can immediately encourage a website visitor to stay on your website, it is the content that fills the design that will ultimately sell your school. Website content has two key elements: visual content, such as photos, videos, graphic and design elements, and infographics and written content such as paragraphs, lists, news, headlines, blogs and calls to action. Appealing visuals encourage your students and parents to enjoy their time on your school website. This ultimately means that they will stay longer and return in the future
Additionally, it’s worth remembering that today’s website visitors don’t read your content, they scan it — especially if they’re visiting on a mobile device. So, ensuring website pages aren’t filled with paragraphs of small-test font is critical.
Add Search Functionality
Whether seeking information or products, when searching the web, people are impatient. It’s just the way we are.
A valuable addition to any school website is the search function.
Parents do not want to spend hours looking for the information they need. So in addition to an easy navigation, the search function is fundamental in adding value to the user experience.
Use the Correct Imagery
Do not underestimate the importance of your images. Each page of your school website should have its own specific purpose, (If it’s not adding value to your message – get rid!.) With this in mind, using overpowering or unrelated imagery can really detract attention away from what’s important.
Don’t crowd the page with imagery, avoid masses of animation on one page and make sure the imagery used relates to the content. It should also be noted that cutting down on the number of images you use on each page of your website can help with site speed.
Contact Information
The answer to that, is no, they are not. At some point, your business will need to embrace them on some capacity. This opens the door to competing in ever growing, busy market places.
When looking for a graphic designer, chemistry and an understanding of your aims is vital. Never hire a designer that has no experience in your industry. They will struggle to reach your target audience. Look for a design agency that understands how to convey your brand message. They will effectively communicate your values, and will be with you throughout the journey.
Fully Mobile Responsive
While an eye-catching design is essential, ensuring that design works well on mobile is just as important. Most schools and districts get, on average, about 50-60% of their total website traffic come from mobile. Ensuring the mobile experience is just as good as the desktop experience is key.
Unless you want this traffic to bounce immediately, you have to provide parents and students with information and design that functions across all multiple devices.
Fast Loading Speed
Today’s consumer expects your website to load quickly, and therefore site speed plays a major factor as to whether a prospective or current family member even makes it to your website. Ensuring that your school website pages load in no more than 6 seconds is a basic principle which must be adhered to. In fact 40% of visitors will leave if you site load is over 3 seconds. If you don’t want to wait, your students and parents won’t either. In addition to this, slow loading speeds have a negative effect on SEO – FACT
Now Test Yourself - Do you need to improve your school website?
Our final tip – why not take this simple, but eye opening test. Make a list of all the important questions your families often ask, and see how easy (or hard) it is to find the answers on your web site.
We can help improve your school website
Building a website that engages your students and parents shouldn’t seem out of reach. However, if you’d like to find out more about how FM Litho can help with your school website, get in touch with our friendly team today. We’ll be more than happy to help.
